Hacker News Reader

Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

August 18, 2017

Also, don't be mislead by the headline. To quote a comment on the article:

"Imagine the Secure Enclave as a vault. Apple hung a big, dark curtain over it to prevent anyone from even seeing the vault. Now, that curtain has been opened and people can see the vault. The vault, however, is still locked as securely as ever."

View on HN

Maybe for a casual reader, but nothing is misleading about the headline unless you don’t understand how Apple’s Secure Enclave Processor (SEP) works.

For more on that, as mentioned in the linked page, there’s the “Demystifying the Secure Enclave Processor” talk from Blackhat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UNeUT_sRos

Or here’s the PDF:

https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Mandt-De...

> unless you don’t understand how Apple’s Secure Enclave Processor (SEP) works.

So basically it’s only misleading to 99.9999% of people?

Not on HN, where I expect most readers to understand what is firmware and what happens when you have its binaries and/or source code.

I think you’re a bit out of touch in that regard.

I think that 99.99% applies to even HN and it certainly applies to me.

I think the best you can hope for, even here, is that the majority says "from the headline I'm not sure what that means in practice, so I'll reserve judgment until I look into this."

And even that's a tall order.

Even if you understand firmware (which I wouldn't expect of most readers, just some; the reason we develop abstractions is so our fellow hackers can hack on new things instead of studying the same things we already studied and hacked), it's extremely common for companies that keep security software secret to rely on that secrecy for security. You need to understand the Secure Enclave in particular and believe that the Apple folks are both talented and honest enough to implement what they say they're implementing to know that, in this case, that's not what's happening.

Back when this was first posted, the headline on HN from an article was “Secure Enclave decrypted”, which couldn’t be further from the truth. The more nuanced “Secure Enclave firmware decrypted” replaced it, and is vastly more accurate. Both headlines fail a general public test IMO, but at least the “firmware” is factually true!

Isn't it more like getting the plans to the vault?

It’s more like acquiring knowledge of the mechanics of a safe dial lock: if the mechanism exposes a safe interface, it doesn’t matter. Only if there’s a flaw in the inner workings of the lock, that an attacker can exploit from the outside, does it pose a problem.

Isn’t there always a flaw?

Actually the sentence you've chosen is misleading. This is the essential step towards breaking the iPhone open. The next steps will be less news worthy, til we get a jail break

Reply on news.ycombinator.com